Display editor-specific skins in editor?

[Brendon Chung]

I was wondering if there was a way to make models display differently in DarkRadiant.

For example: a model that has specific material settings that make it appear dark/black in the editor (i.e. the material has something like: RGB parm5, or a fire burn effect stage, etc). The model looks fine in-game; but looks strange in the editor due to its various material settings.

I was wondering if there was some sort of keyvalue like "editor_displayskin" that would make the model use a specific skin override when displayed in the DarkRadiant editor -- this keyvalue would point toward a 'sanitized' version of the material that makes it appear more correct in the editor.

[OrbWeaver]

There is not currently any such feature.

It probably wouldn't be a huge amount of work to implement, but to me it seems very much a stop-gap measure of limited utility. The objective of the lighting mode render is to look as similar to the game as possible by rendering objects in the same way; if you want a more visible but less accurate view, the unlit render mode is designed for this purpose. When the lighting mode does not look the same as the game, this can be considered a bug in the DR renderer which should eventually be fixed (and Greebo has been doing some amazing work in DR 3.0 closing the gap between game and editor rendering).

I don't think that manually creating "editor-only skins", simply to fake the correct rendered appearance, is a good use of either mapper time or developer time. Mappers should create content the way they want it to look in the game, and DR should do the best job it can to render that content in an accurate way.

[Brendon Chung]

Makes sense! Thanks.

[demagogue]

The editor is a tool in the service of a mapper getting their vision into the map. I think having brushes more accurately reflecting their final state, or what's most useful for the mapper to have it reflected as, can be fairly seen as contributing to that task. At the end of the day, mapping has as much to do with the attention and motivation of the mapper than the technical aspects by themselves. And the benchmark is what mappers find useful. I'd think of it as in the neighborhood of grouping; it's a mapper added tweak for mapping purposes. So I think it's a worthwhile feature to have.

That said, it'd call for a feature request, and I don't know how high the relative priority would be for it, which is another issue.

[LDAsh]

qer_editorimage?

This is ignored by the renderer and only affects how Radiant displays it.  Another workaround is to have different MTR files, one that is activated for mapping and then swapped out again for playtesting, which could be done with simple BAT files.  There are a few options I can think, for the sake of better editor visibility.